The Urumqi Mandarin dialect has three tones, whereas Standard (Beijing) Mandarin has four tones. Recently, younger speakers in Urumqi began to use Standard Mandarin in daily conversation. We investigate how they acquire the tones in Standard Mandarin, especially the rising tone (T2) which lacks a counterpart in Urumqi Mandarin. We will show that these younger speakers initially use Urumqi tones...

This paper investigates the transitive uses of the verb fan „annoy; be annoyed; bother to do‟, which exhibit both similarities and disparities between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, as far as the data from Gigaword corpus, containing data from Mainland China (XIN) and Taiwan (CNA), are concerned. In terms of similarities, the causative (and agentive) use(s) of the transitive fan is/are s...

This study investigated the spectral distributions of Mandarin retroflexion produced by Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin speakers. Results showed that Taiwan Mandarin speakers‟ retroflex production had a higher spectral mean than their Beijing Mandarin counterparts, yet the two groups‟ distributions overlapped to a certain degree. This indicates that retroflexion is gradient and that retrof...

This work investigated crosslinguistic perception of Mandarin utterances conveying six classes of attitudes, i.e., dominant/ submissive, friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and sincere/insincere. Five groups of subjects were tested: native Mandarin speakers, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, naïve Japanese without Mandarin ability, an...

Background: Rough-skin disorder mainly occurs in 6-12 years old young and senile orchards of Nagpur mandarin due to excess application or availability potassium. The characteristics rough-skinned fruits are large fruit size with rough textured peel, segments loose intact rind, improper shape (fruit length breadth ratio is equal one more than one), reduced juice per cent TSS. Methods: Based on t...

This study investigated the categorization of Mandarin lexical tones and music melodic tones by listeners differing in linguistic and musical experience (English musicians, English non-musicians, and Mandarin non-musicians). Linguistic tonal continua were created from the Mandarin rising to level, and falling to level tones. Melodic continua were created by varying the note D under the context ...

In Mandarin Chinese, there exist three pairs of voiceless alveolar and retroflex sibilants. Literature on Mandarin phonology generally prescribes a distinctive place contrast made in Beijing Mandarin, whereas a neutralization of the two categories is suggested for Taiwan Mandarin. However, some acoustic studies (e.g., Jeng 2006; Li 2009) have recently started to contend that retroflex neutraliz...

At first sight, Java’s position as the de-facto standard for portable software distributed across the Internet seems virtually unassailable. Interestingly enough, however, it is surprisingly simple to provide alternatives to the Java platform, using the plug-in mechanism supported by the major commercial World Wide Web browsers. We are currently developing a comprehensive infrastructure for mob...

Although the auditory aspects of Mandarin speech are relatively more heavily-researched and well-known in the field, this study addresses its visual aspects by examining the perception of both Mandarin natural and synthetic visual speech. In perceptual experiments, the synthetic visual speech of a computer-animated Mandarin talking head was evaluated and subsequently improved. Also, the basic (...

PURPOSE The author compared monosyllabic Mandarin lexical tones produced by 3-year-old Mandarin-speaking children growing up in Taiwan and in the United States. METHOD Following the procedures in Wong, Schwartz, and Jenkins (2005), the author collected monosyllabic tone productions from 3-year-old Mandarin-speaking children in Taiwan and low-pass filtered them to eliminate lexical information...